Interactive video is a format in which the learner can perform actions inside the player rather than being a passive viewer — answering questions, clicking annotated hotspots, choosing narrative branches, or adding personal notes anchored to timestamps. The interactivity is layered on top of standard HTML5 video: the player listens for time events fired by the media element and overlays UI components at the right moment. Learner actions and results are tracked as xAPI statements, often using the xAPI Video Profile extended with interaction verbs, or wrapped in a SCORM run-time call when a legacy LMS requires it. Interactivity raises engagement and forces active recall, which research in instructional design consistently links to better retention compared with passive viewing. The main engineering trade-off is complexity: branching requires a scene graph, hotspots require coordinate systems that survive video scaling, and quizzes must be timed to specific frames without drifting on variable-bitrate streams. At the authoring layer, tools such as H5P, Articulate Storyline, and purpose-built SDKs generate the overlay metadata separately from the video file itself, so the media asset can be re-encoded without losing interaction data. Interactive video sits at the intersection of all other terms in this block: branching scenarios, hotspots, in-video quizzes, chapters, and learner annotations are each specialised forms of interactivity layered onto the same underlying video track.
